Affinity proposes to establish a conceptual framework for the management and extraction and use of various ship engineering and design data that exist in large, heterogeneous, geographically separated databases. Affinity will base its analysis on its Object-Oriented, FusionWare infrastructure. FusionWare is a CORBA meta data respository framework that allows integration of tools and applications and seamless access to heterogeneous databases. The FusionWare framework will allow all of the collaborative efforts to be managed under a common, logically centralized security/access control layer. This security mechanism provides for the defining of user roles and tools that are allowed to access and process each of the various data objects involved.
